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Communists and Auto Workers: the Struggle for Industrial Unionism in the Canadian Automobile Industry, 1925-36

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Communists and Auto Workers: the Struggle for Industrial Unionism in the Canadian Automobile Industry, 1925-36 Document generated on 09/29/2021 9:16 a.m. Labour/Le Travailleur Communists and Auto Workers The Struggle for Industrial Unionism in the Canadian Automobile Industry, 1925-36 John Manley Volume 17, 1986 URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/llt17art05 See table of contents Publisher(s) Canadian Committee on Labour History ISSN 0700-3862 (print) 1911-4842 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Manley, J. (1986). Communists and Auto Workers: The Struggle for Industrial Unionism in the Canadian Automobile Industry, 1925-36. Labour/Le Travailleur, 17, 105–134. All rights reserved © Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1986 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Communists and Auto Workers: The Struggle for Industrial Unionism in the Canadian Automobile Industry, 1925-36 John Manley BEFORE THE UNITED Automobile Workers of America (UAW) chartered its first Canadian local, at Kelsey-Hayes Wheel, Windsor, in December 1936, there had been several "fruitless and sporadic organizing attempts in the Cana­ dian auto shops."1 This paper deals with the attempts of the 1920s and early 1930s, a period in which the organizing burden was borne almost exclusively by members of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). Despite growing interest in "the party." surprisingly little attention has been given to its pri­ mary orientation towards industrial struggle. Were Communists effective industrial organizers? What contribution — if any — did they make towards laying the foundations of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)? This paper is equally interested in the auto workers themselves. Did they, for exam­ ple, as Irving Abella has argued, believe that "only American unions could provide the necessary muscle to protect and forward their interest?"2 Was this why they gravitated to the CIO in 1936-7? In answering these questions, and particularly in attempting to analyze where rank-and-file ideas came from, we have to turn first to the industry and the workplace. 1 THE CANADIAN AUTO INDUSTRY is entirely a product of the twentieth cen­ tury. the first home-produced car having been put together in 1901 by the 1 Jerry Hartford. "The United Automobile Workers in Canada," Canadian Labour, 5 (I960), 6. -Irving Abella, Nationalism. Communism, and Canadian Labour (Toronto 1973. 23-4. John Manley, "Communists and Autoworkers: The Struggle for Industrial Unionism in the Canadian Automobile Industry, 1925-36," LabourILe Travail, 17 (Spring 1986). 105-133. 105 106 LABOUR/LE TRAVAIL Canada Cycle and Motor Company in Toronto. By 1910, the year in which Ford of Canada (founded 1904) produced 1,000 units for the first time. Ameri­ can domination was well established, and by 1929, when the industry produced a record 262,000 vehicles valued at $163.5 million, production was over­ whelmingly concentrated in the hands of the "Big Three:" Ford, General Motors (GM) of Canada (1918), and Chrysler (1925). Geographical concentra­ tion was equally marked. In 1926 southern Ontario contained 55 of the Dominion's 70 auto and auto parts plants.:i Oshawa, site of the main GM plant, and the major "Border Cities" municipalities of Windsor, Walkerville, and East Windsor, which together embraced most of the other significant plants. had become virtually single-industry towns by the 1920s. By the 1910s, the industry's high-wage reputation was attracting masses of workers to the auto towns. In 1913 Ford was paying its labourers and semi­ skilled assemblers and machine operators rates between 32.5 per cent and 45 per cent above the going rate for common labour in the Border Cities. During the brief post-war boom, when accommodation could barely cope with the influx of labour, skilled and unskilled wages in Windsor were reported as "practically the highest.. in any part of the Dominion." In 1925 average earnings in the industry stood at $ 1,577 as against $97 I for the manufacturing industry as a whole.4 In short, for the unskilled, a job in auto was the key to the craft worker's living standards. High wages were taken as symptomatic of auto's vanguard status within Canadian industrial capitalism. Visitors to the auto plants, noting the innova­ tions in layout, assembly-line techniques, and semi-automatic machinery, mar­ velled at "the wonderful organization which made it possible to put cars together with such speed and exactness."' Few could have found an answer to the Border Cities Star's triumphal question: "Where in all the history of industry has there been progress to compare with that rolled up in the manufac­ ture of cars and trucks?"'5 Assessing how auto workers felt about their situation is more difficult. :' C. Howard Aikman. The Automobile Industry of Canada (Toronto 1926): Robert Collins, A Great Way to Go; The Automobile In Canada (Toronto 1969). 36-42; M. Mclntyre Hood. Oshawa: Canada's Motor Citx (Oshawa 1968), 123-31; Provincial Archives of Ontario (PAO). Labour Department Records, Files of the Senior Inves­ tigator, VII-1, Box 3, "List of firms Furnishing Information Used in Summary. 1926;" "The Automobile Industry in Canada." Industrial Canada (iC), 7 (1907), 781-3. 1 Labour Gazette. (LG) 14(1914), 968; Report of the Superintendant of the Trades and Labour Branch, 1919. Ontario Sessional Papers. No. 16, 1921; First Annual Report of the Department of Labour. 1920, Ontario Sessional Papers, No. 16, 1920; "Wage Earners' Progress in Canada Since The War," American Federationist, 36 (1929), 184-7; House of Commons, Debates, 9 March 1928, 1154. "' "Ontario Members Visit Border Cities," IC, 28 (1927), 68-69; Harold P. Armson, "Building 80 Cars a Day in Toronto's Ford Plant." Canadian Machinery and Manufac­ turing News <CMMN), 31 (I4February 1924). 15-9. K Border Cities Star (BCS), 19 July 1928. COMMUNISTS AND AUTOWORKERS 107 From the outside, workers in less favoured industries often looked on in envy. Some working-class observers went so far as to see the auto industry — and Ford in particular — as the prefiguration of a reformed capitalism, a view that horrified the radical left.7 But even Communists were inclined to believe that auto workers had been seduced by the '"fool's paradise of Fordism." Certainly they displayed little interest in the CPC's earliest shop-gate agitation." The historians of Ford's transnational operations attributed the apparent contentment of Ford's workers quite simply to "better wages."" Yet what Ford called the "wage motive" was not the only determinant of rank-and-file attitudes and behaviour. It was undeniably an effective carrot, but with it went the stick of knowing how easily high wages could be lost. Auto workers were well aware that they could be replaced with little trouble. Ford claimed that the vast majority of jobs in the Ford plants could be learned in the course of a single shift. One such job required a machine operator to load and unload a machine, which between times performed a sequence of four reaming and drilling processes on crankshafts held in a rotating jig; by 1924 Ford had 4.000 semi-automatic machines installed at the Ford City plant (incorporated as East Windsor in 1929) — as many as the total number of workers employed."' Whether machine operators or assemblers, the key quality was "nervous endurance to carry through dull, monotonous, fatiguing rhythmic opera­ tions,"11 This quality was not in short supply. The seasonal nature of production reinforced the auto workers' sense of vulnerability. When the autumn slowdown began, leading into a virtual shut­ down for all but toolroom staff, a labour reserve was produced which in turn facilitated the removal of recalcitrant elements. Before unionization, workers were less likely to take collective action on behalf of work equalization than to seek individual solutions by currying favour with foremen and supervisors. Favouritism also provided management with a pliable supply of informants.'* 7 "Labor's Claims Proven," Labor Leader, 25 August 1922; "Labor Leader Attacks Miners' Low Wages." Labor Statesman, 12 March 1926 (reprinted from the Alberta Labor News); "Ford and Ford Methods — Degrading to Trade Unionism." Maritime Labor Herald, 20 October 1923. * The Worker, 22 August 1925; 16 July 1927. ;' Mira Wilkins and Frank Ernest Mill. America Business Abroad: ford on Six Conti­ nents (Detroit 1964). 53-4, 101. '" Henry Ford in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, Today and Tomorrow (Garden Cit> 1926), 183; Harold A. Armson. "Building A Car at Ford City." CMMN 31 (26 June 1924). 41-8. " Charles Reitell. "Machinery and Its Effects Upon the Workers in the Automobile Industry," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 116 (1924). 37-43. '- House of Commons. Debates. 6 February 1928. 212; Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (New York 196S). 78; David Moulton, "Ford Windsor 1945," in Irving Abella. ed.. On Strike: Six AVv Labour Struggles in Canada. 1919-1949 (Toronto 1975). 155. 108 LABOURA^E TRAVAIL The nature of the job itself had a disciplinary impact. "Fordism" (a generic title) was characterized by a high degree of what American economist Richard Edwards terms "technical control," with workplace
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